Their lives today are the stuff of fantasy, but once upon a time celebs dreamed big, did homework and drove ugly cars...

GILLIAN ANDERSON

After a visit to London in the early '80s, Gillian Anderson returned to Grand Rapids, Mich., where she was a student at City High School. Only now the former preppie, perhaps under the influence of the country that gave the world the Sex Pistols, was a punk. "She had cut all her brown hair off and dyed it red," recalls classmate Michael Kritschgau, an AIDS studies coordinator in Chicago. "Gillian has always been ahead of other people." Eventually voted Most Bizarre, Anderson, 28 also pierced her nose and wore thrift-shop designs. The X-Files star wasn't creative in appearance alone. Prose about her pet iguana appeared in the school paper.

"As he spreads himself unenthusiastically on his rock,
a hint of sorrow spurts from beneath his lidded eyes,"
(she wrote in a clever fever)
"He is no longer the plump reptile I once knew and loved."

THE 50 MOST BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE IN THE WORLD 1997 - May 12, 1997

GILLIAN ANDERSON

BEAUTY TRAVELS IN MANY ORBITS, AND FOR GILLIAN Anderson, 28, playing The X-Files' brainy FBI agent Dana Scully is heavenly. "It isn't Baywatch," she says. "I'm sort of the anti-Pam." Files' executive producer Chris Carter calls her looks "formidable. She's not just a kitten." At first, though, the 5'3 redhead found the whole idea of glamour positively paranormal. When she auditioned four years ago, she looked like "a disheveled urchin," says Carter. But, hey, stardom demands a better do - and an occasional facial. Anderson, who shares her Vancouver, B.C., home with daughter Piper, 2, and is separated from her art director husband, Clyde Klotz, still favors baggy black jeans and has no mirrors in her home. But she exercises regularly and usually follows a healthy diet, a combination that makes her an earthling's delight.

"She's gotten more beautiful as I've known her," says Files' Mitch Pileggi, who plays FBI assistant director Walter Skinner. Loyal internet surfers, meanwhile, have formed the Gillian Anderson Testosterone Brigade. To keep the extraterrestrial look at bay, Anderson plucks her eyebrows ("not a pleasurable thing") and uses her reddish-brown M.A.C. lipstick mixed with face powder as eye shadow. She couldn't care less about signs of aging. "Those little smile lines you get, even when you're not smiling?" she says. "Very distinguished looking."